The neoliberal argument says that the distribution of income between all the world’s people has become more equal over the past two decades and the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen, for the ﬁrst time in more than a century and a half. It says that these progressive trends are due in large part to the rising density of economic integration between countries, which has made for rising eﬃciency of resource use worldwide as countries and regions specialize in line with their comparative advantage. Hence the combination of the ‘‘dollar-Wall Street’’ economic regime in place since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods regime in the early 1970s, and the globalizing direction of change in the world economy since then, serves the great majority of the world’s people well. The core solution for lagging regions, Africa above all, is freer domestic and international trade and more open ﬁnancial markets, leading to deeper integration into the world economy.

… The standard Left assumption, in contrast, is that the rich and powerful countries and classes have little interest in greater equity. Consistent with this view, the ‘‘anti-globalization’’ (more accurately, ‘‘anti-neoliberal’’) argument asserts that world poverty and inequality have been rising, not falling, due to forces unleashed by the same globalization (for example, union leader Jay Mazur’s quote above). The line of solution is some degree of tightening of public policy limits on the operation of market forces; though the ‘‘anti-neoliberal’’ camp embraces a much wider range of solutions than the liberal camp.

The debate tends to be conducted by each side as if its case was overwhelming, and only an intellectually deﬁcient or dishonest person could see merit in other’s case. For example, Martin Wolf of The Financial Times claims that the ‘‘anti-globalization’’ argument is ‘‘the big lie.’’ If translated into public policy it would cause more poverty and inequality while pretending to do the opposite.

I think this is a reasonable summary of the two core competing positions on globalisation and poverty. Certainly, my experience with talking to people with a — conscious or unconscious — neoliberal economic position (as evidenced in the above tweets) is that there is an assumption that industrialisation and rapid increase in production of goods, and “opening up” of markets (particularly labour markets) in the Third World is responsible for a reduction in poverty in those countries.

My own view, which is roughly summarised as the “standard Left assumption” is that imperialistic and developed countries have grossly exploited developing nations for the enrichment of a few global elite, with catastrophic human, social and environmental costs.

I would contend for example, that the over-production of Gilded Era capitalism in the late 1800s for example was a driving force behind the imperialistic expansion of the USA, annexation of the Philippines and Cuba, not to mention the brutal repression of working people and unionists in the great industrial centres of the US (e.g. Chicago, New York City, etc).

While I have no doubt that many millions of people are now not living in poverty because of the ongoing industrialisation of countries like China or India (although China argues the reported World Bank numbers are overstated), I also have no doubt that many more millions (probably hundreds of millions) have been impoverished sickened and subjected to untold cruelty as a result of globalisation and the production of “cheap crap” (as Steel puts it).

Additionally, I have no doubt that globalisation has allowed wealthy, developed nations to effectively export their poverty, just as they export their carbon emissions, low labour standards and pollution as well. Devastating toxic pollutants banned in places like Australia and the US are regularly manufactured in and exported from (and spilled in) in the Third World, for the benefit of the First.

Cheap goods are produced in great abundance because of poor labour standards, including the harassment, arrest and murder of unionists, child labour, deplorable health and safety conditions or near (or actual) slave-like standards. Large multitudes of people are moved from rural (yes, subsistence) lives to work in vast slums where health standards are poor, and violence (both state and individual) is rife.

In many areas (especially Africa), whole countries’ economies, infrastructures and governments are warped by the needs of multi-national corporations, designed solely to funnel the natural resources of those nations to the West. This can create or exacerbate conflict zones, ethnic tensions and civil war.

I am utterly unconvinced that the present economic system has resulted in a fair or equitable distribution of the world’s wealth. I am also unconvinced that this economic system of globalisation has done anything to reduce poverty.

In fact, as article-author Robert Hunter Wade notes: “The opening sentence of the Bank’s World Development Indicators 2001 says, ‘‘Of the world’s 6 billion people 1.2 billion live on less than $1 a day,’’ the same number in 1987 and 1998.”

Even accepting that the lives of subsistence farmers in the Third World were “nasty, brutish and short” (to use a turn of phrase), that does not excuse the fact that the lives of slum-dwelling sweatshop workers is substantively better. Even were they marginally better, it does not make it good that they dwell in such misery… that somehow the march of progress justifies such infliction of mass human misery by one group (the West) upon another (the global South).

Additionally, assuming that poverty has at least remained the same over the last thirty years, in the last decade we have seen the most dramatic rise in inequality in history. The neoliberal argument is that both poverty and inequality decrease due to globalisation. This is manifestly not true.

The global distribution of wealth has tipped so far in favour of a small band of plutocrats that it is now in danger of falling permanently in their favour. This is, of course, the nub of the 1%-99% ‘movement’. Across the world, “pay inequality” (which I assume equates to wages as a share of GDP) has increased sharply since the 1980s. In the US, income inequality has now returned to the robber-baron era of the late 1800s.

The evidence does support the liberal argument when inequality is measured with population-weighted countries’ per capita PPP adjusted incomes, plus a measure of average inequality, taking China’s income statistics at face value. On the other hand, polarization has clearly increased. Moreover, several studies that measure inequality over the whole distribution and use either cross-sectional household survey data or measures of combined inequality between countries and within countries show widening inequality since around 1980. The conclusion is that world inequality measured in plausible ways is probably rising, despite China’s and India’s fast growth.

In fact, the argument can be made that rapid industrialisation without market forces (that is, through government policy and direct investment) is more effective at advancing a nation and reducing poverty. The examples of both China and India are exemplars — where both nations industrialised before selectively opening up to global market forces (South Korea and Japan, and even Australia, are examples of this). Compare this to nations like Chile, Mexico or many of the former Soviet states (like the Czech Republic), which have undergone the “shock doctrine“.

I acknowledge that Steel and Ratcliff were not explicitly writing about globalisation or free markets, but neoliberal assumptions on economic development were certainly present.

Nevertheless, their argument, that industrialisation “pulled the world out of poverty” in my view, doesn’t hold up. In fact, I would contend that the opposite has occurred and that poverty has increased.